SSL & Chrome 68

SSL Certificate: WHY YOU MUST HAVE ONE

Starting now, visitors to your small business website might see a notification near your address that says your site isn’t secure. Google Chrome is behind the move that’s flagging the HTTP format in your URL in favor of the more secure HTTPS version. Any website still being served via HTTP will receive a negative visual indicator that says, “not secure” beside the URL in Chrome’s address bar. If an SSL Certificate is not purchased and installed, your site will eventually be blacklisted by Google searches and will not appear in the results as they once did.

This occurs because the website is set up to use secure SSL encryption. Your web browser uses the HTTP protocol to connect to traditional unencrypted websites, but uses HTTPS–literally, HTTP with SSL—when connecting to secure websites. Website owners have to set up HTTPS before it will work on their websites.

Google and other web companies, including Mozilla, have been waging a long-term campaign to move the web from HTTP to HTTPS. HTTP is now considered an outdated technology that websites shouldn’t use.

Originally, only a few websites used HTTPS. Your bank and other sensitive websites would use HTTPS, and you’d be redirected to an HTTPS page while signing into websites with a password and entering your credit card number. But that was it.